Depression Linked to Faster Chronic Disease Onset

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Adults who have experienced depression develop long-term physical conditions about 30% faster than those without depression, a new study finds. Authors of the report said depression needs to be viewed as a “whole body” condition, with treatment approaches that address mental and physical health.

The report was published Thursday in PLOS Medicine. Investigators evaluated the association between depression and the rate at which conditions accrued in midlife and older age.

Researchers included 172,556 volunteers in the UK Biobank study. All of the participants were between 40 and 71 years old, and each completed a baseline assessment between 2006 and 2010. The team identified 69 physical conditions, following participants for nearly seven years to see if they developed any of the ailments.

Among participants, 17.8% had depression. At the start of the study, participants who had depression had three physical conditions on average while those without depression had two. But over the course of the study, adults with a history of depression accrued an average of 0.2 additional physical conditions per year, while those without accrued 0.16.

The conditions that were most common included osteoarthritis. This affected 15.7% of those with depression compared to 12.5% without depression at the start of the study. Hypertension was reported in 12.9% of people with depression and in 12% of those without, while 13.8% of participants with depression developed gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) compared to 9.6% without depression.

Research has shown that depression is linked with a variety of physical health ailments such as diabetes and heart disease. Being diagnosed with depression is an indicator that a person is at risk for developing long-term physical health conditions as they age, the authors said.

“Existing healthcare systems are designed to treat individual conditions, instead of individual people with multiple conditions. We need healthcare services to take an integrated approach to caring for people who have both depression and long-term physical health conditions,” the authors said in a statement.

Reference: Fleetwood KJ, Guthrie B, Jackson CA, et al. Depression and physical multimorbidity: A cohort study of physical health condition accrual in UK Biobank. Patel V, ed. PLoS Med. 2025;22(2):e1004532. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004532

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